Konrad Heidkamp (1988)

So JUST LIKE the wrong shoes in the headphones

One set of headphones after another…then, again and again, a diversionary step to the left. The record sorters at WOM watch me somewhat distrustingly whenever I take a few notes. Branford Marsalis, Peter Erskine – I can’t think of anything to say about them. Miles Davis ‘Sketches of Spain’ – I’m stuck. It should be something new. Wayne Horvitz, Chris Jarrett – it all sounds LIKE something you’ve already heard. That’s not what I’m after. ‘Thelonious Monk himself’. Thelonious, his self, personally. He plays two chords and it sounds like Thelonious Monk. You hang on every note, waiting for what’s coming .Somehow you know, but it’s always exciting. When he improvises you can hear his ideas groping their way from one brain-synapse to another; still, the music always somehow sounds inevitable; it just couldn’t have gone any other way. He could never take off his hats and caps; one would have seen them – those tones leaping about in his head.

In November, a whole week’s worth of the Berlin Jazz Days. Hardly anybody had a hat on. One stumbles through the record bins; they’re dusty, each bearing a label that’s supposed to pass for the name of a style: Tribute to XY. In other words: “just LIKE….”. The style is identical to a method. Trumpet, sax, piano, bass, drums; sometimes one omits the bass and the drums are allowed only four bars. Or a+b, b+c, a+c; the common denominator tonal, modal or free. Some of the audience flipped through their programs while the others listened; as you wished. Hardly anybody walked out, nobody screamed shit. You only had the wrong headphones on for short periods. A style barometer from one of the local Berlin clubs should have been compulsory: Rock/Jazz/Swing/Bebop/Free Jazz. Just skip over a few headphones and don’t worry about being served something you didn’t order. “Oh, no, not Free Jazz…”, I heard someone say in a jazz club a couple of months ago, and by the inflection it was clear that the speaker had gotten on the wrong tram. But, no mater; all you’ve got to do is to get out at the next station and come back to where you were. For years the avant-garde has been in a blind alley – there are no enemies anymore; it’s become an asylum for unemployed revolutionaries. You no longer have to perceive anything; it all sounds so “just like…”

The record stores tell you when a musical style belongs to the past. Like “Punk” or “New Wave”, the category “Free Jazz” was eliminated long ago. The revolution is over and is now being sorted alphabetically. John Coltrane comes before Eddie Condon; Ornette Coleman, after Nat King Cole; the Art Ensemble of Chicago follows Armstrong; Taylor and Tatum are quite close to one another. And that’s o.k. What did John Coltrane ever have to do with Ornette Coleman? What did Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor have in common? They kept out of each other’s way and they knew why. I had a copy of ‘My Favorite Things’, and my best fiend hat one of ‘Change of the Century’ and we were both Free Jazz fans. His parents jumped up from the sofa and so did mine – it worked. A style was defined. He had listened to Miles Davis and I to Dizzy Gillespie; as far as we were concerned, they were both playing Bebop. Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s account of jazz lineage would have confused us, and we wouldn’t have been alone. Coltrane’s desperate search for the One Sound that contains all others, Taylor’s efforts to develop a seamless musical fabric by means of rhythmic shorthand, the endless melodic loops of Coleman’s that seek to pin down a mood – each of these, even if they all lead to the same goal, represents a different, irreconcilable path. Cecil Taylor really does belong next to Art Tatum.

For 24,95 DM Ornette Coleman’s ‘In all Languages’. Voices that speak. The only possible inflection for what he wants to say. He can’t play false because the musical system is identical with the person. One can imagine his playing “poorly”, but only when he’s not in touch with himself. Still, he never plays “more poorly than…”. Or maybe he’s playing with the wrong people, in which case you’re embarrassed for him. Sometimes it is embarrassing, but it never leaves you cold. In his best moments, content, form and inflection create an organic whole, but even when his music simply chatters along meaninglessly and incoherently, his sound and phrasing make him incomparable. What more can anyone say? Is Parker’s “Lover Man” weaker than “Confirmation”? Is rain less desirable than sunshine? Whoever loves Robert Mitchum’s eyes and voice will overlook, however wistfully, his banal films.

Randy Brecker – it’s getting chilly. Better make a big skip, to more fertile terrain. John Coltrane’s “Ballads”. Every time I change apartments, I stand before my record cabinet, take a glance at all those intervening flights of stairs, and hear myself mumbling the standard apologies to my friends as they attempt to lift the boxes with the record; I resolve, once again, either to sell or give away quite a lot. The old question: which ones do listen to rarely or not at all? To appease my conscience, perhaps to transfer a few pieces to cassette, I begin to play through them. I have in fact given many away that I’ve hardly missed, but never one by John Coltrane. It’s always the same. Like when you reread old letters; you know some of them by heard, some you’ve forgotten; some are irritating, but you can’t deny them. Coltrane Time, Taylor Time, Monk Time. Often I don’t listen to their music for months on end; then I know that I’ve been in a transition; maybe those months are lost; maybe they were necessary to feel again what’s important.

Gil Evans plays Bud and Bird. The John Coltrane Quartet without Coltrane. The Bill Evans Trio without Bill Evans. The Ellington Orchestra without Duke Ellington. It’s zombie jazz. Plastic, a lip-synched wax-figure cabinet. Inflections are imitated and it sounds JUST LIKE…well, honesty. But only “almost just like”. And this “almost just like” is even more horrifying than “just like” because it means that music from the past is no longer perceived as a possible point of departure for something original. Rather it’s treated like a corpse, prettily mummified for display; the label reassures you that it really is dead. Hollywood at least is honest and unpretentious about it’s grave-robbing. In contrast, the official jazz establishment’s pretense of paying homage to past artists reveals itself more and more as a sham; if producers were really interested in honoring a great legacy, they would give living musicians a chance to find out which parts of that legacy are still usuable today. I might bemoan the absence of great personalities, or belabor some point about the Post Modern; I could describe the socio-political context – but that’s rather boring; the headphone with Ornette Coleman is free again. Coleman sounds exactly like Coleman.

A few shreds of electric hum, some second-rate piano-bar music, some rolls on the tablas, a few lyrical trumpets – the urge to compare sets in once again. A bit like, not quite like, better than, worse than. The “woe of comparison”, Peter Handke once dubbed it. Maybe I’m the problem; I just can’t muster the strength, or maybe I’m just not with it anymore. “I don’t know what’s going on in pop music right now – I was sick for two weeks”, Ray Davies of the Kinks once barbed. In jazz there’s little chance of sleeping through a style change, but after a while, the names don’t mean anything anymore. Then you realize that the names are all interchangeable. So here I am, standing in front of the record bins, helplessly rummaging through the titles. I wanted to find out what’s happening, to write something ground-breaking about new tendencies, perhaps compare the New York with the British avant-garde, but I just can’t into it. I’m stuck with Monk and Trane and I can’t decide if they’re simply good or just familiar. Mostly I’m hearing new methods, new models, but no new human beings. So once again I get into my car and drive six hundred kilometers to rediscover a sound I once heard which still haunts me. Harmonic or rhythmic innovations are not the issue. I only know that I’ve got to be back again early Monday morning and that it’ll be another Monday morning. Forget the records at home; hop in the car – it’ll be worth it. Peter Brötzmann’s neck, Ornette Coleman’s jackets, Cecil Taylor’s socks, Chet Baker’s stool, Dexter Gordon’s eyes, Archie Shepp’s shoes – if you haven’t seen these, you can’t understand their music. They’re not improvising on chord progressions; they’re improvising on their souls. The relationship to the shoes is more important than any music theory. Only when the music matches the shoes does it cease to be arbitrary. The endless complaints about the excessive freedom of Free Jazz, the parallelism of musical laissez-faire and societal indifference of the eighties – all this talk would be unnecessary if musicians would stark caring once again about their shoes. My browsing becomes more purposeful, and I resume my search.

“Ornette Coleman is bullshit. When some guy says: Man, I’m improvising on my feelings, I say: Fuck You “, Steve Reich once remarked, stroking his machine-knit sweater as he talked. His pronouncement sounds like something you might have heard in some darkened cellar during the Jazz Inquisition of the 1960’s. Articulated feelings always posses a structure, even if it’s just the breathing and the pauses that accompany the act of speech. The meaning of improvisation lies in both the how and what of an utterance. In every art, the what is defined by the how. Form and content are inseparable; you can no more reconcile the image on your tv screen with a wiring diagram of it’s circuitry, than you can infer how a solo sounds from a transcription. You don’t have to put down Steve Reich to know how good Alexander von Schlippenbach is. Anyway, Steve Reich found a style that matches his pullover. Musicians like Reich know what they compose. Musicians like Ornette Coleman can improvise on their feelings because they’re wearing the right lounge jacket. And they no longer have to think about when and where they bought it. Said another way, to come back to Robert Mitchum: “I’m not sure how I do what I do. But anyone is welcome to try. I mean the store is open to anyone to buy the same materials Picasso uses.” An interesting prospect.

Translation: Daniel Werts

from: Booklet „improvised music“, Free Music Production (FMP), 1988